Plan Santa Barbara Comes Alive with Street-Level View

By David Petry

How do you plan Santa Barbara? How do you shape the future of a town as complex and historic and beloved as this one?

This city has been planning their future through a General Plan originally adopted in 1964, amended many times since, and now in the process of the first significant overhaul in forty-five years. The General Plan lays out the rules and priorities for what, where, and how development will take place in the city. City Council has some leeway in their final determinations, but the philosophical, policy, and regulatory basis for all land use decisions is the General Plan.

This time around, the process to determine what updates to make to the General Plan is being called Plan Santa Barbara. Launched in 2005 by the City Council, it has turned out to be large, expensive, and controversial.

Randy Rowse, owner of the Paradise Café and longtime participant in the Downtown Organization, recommended I look at the website. “There’s a vision of Santa Barbara there that is surprising. I think it will surprise a lot of people.”

What is a General Plan?

The General Plan contains sections (called elements) covering land use and growth management, economy and fiscal health, environmental resources, historic resources and community design, housing, circulation, and public services and safety. There are goals and objectives and policies for each element.

Plan Santa Barbara, available now for review, and to be released in draft form on March 18, consists of a number of studies, presentations, and workshop records. The primary document is the 75-page Policy Preferences which pulls together all the Plan Santa Barbara recommended changes to Santa Barbara’s General Plan.

New to the plan with this update is something called a Sustainability Framework. The framework sets out a definition of sustainability, a vision of Santa Barbara in a sustainable future, and sustainability principles. As the draft plan states, “Being a sustainable community means making decisions based on the connections between the environment, the economy, and the people of the community, for the benefit of all and to preserve and enhance our community character.”

Also in this iteration is an adaptive management element. Adaptive management is a catch-phrase meaning that the city will evaluate progress toward the plan goals and objectives.

The city has made the Plan Santa Barbara process as public as they can. Each study has been rolled out to public review. Every workshop has been announced. The City Council has held review sessions. Special workshops were held for high school students.

But there are multiple problems in making the process accessible. Planning is an abstract practice. The General Plan lies behind the decision-making of the City in regards to infrastructure, housing, commercial development, environment, and services. To some, it’s a bit like knowing the calculus behind architectural requirements. When it comes down to it, architects just use a formula. And that’s pretty much what the City does. They apply formulas from the General Plan that are based on more complex calculations.

Like calculus, there is a technical terminology at play in the planning process. This time the terminology includes Mobility-Oriented Development Areas, form-based codes, adaptive management, sustainability frameworks, floor area ratios, inclusionary ordinances, Smart Growth, historic integrity, and old favorites like affordable housing, transit corridors, and cumulative open space.

The Abstraction Blues

Finding a toehold in the dialogue is almost as hard as getting a mortgage in this town.

The Plan Santa Barbara Policy Preferences document is obscure at best. The first sentence stalls the average reader. “The purpose of this document is to set forth the sustainability framework and policy direction for updating the General Plan.” What is a “sustainability framework?” It’s not defined for another nine pages. What is a “policy direction for updating” anything?

The remaining 74 pages stir the dense planning terminology in scores of ways. Affordable housing, a high priority in the existing General Plan and in this update, appears 54 times, each time the context, need, objectives, and the means of achieving the ends are restated. It would seem that every concept must be linked to every other in order to convince us of their necessity and immediacy.

The magnitude of the city’s responsibility identified in the document is also overwhelming. The Policy Preferences document places responsibility on the city for a successful local economy with businesses oriented to global and environmental imperatives, for shaping development to specific ends such as high-density and lower cost residential units in the downtown core, getting us out of our cars, reducing obesity, and making our lives and the spaces around us vital and livable.

To an extent, the city does tackle all of this, and none of it is necessarily bad or wrong. But in many cases the values and imperatives the document adopts are shaped by current thinking, taste, and assumptions. For example, the document posits as a given that “Socio-economic diversity is essential for maintaining a healthy culture and stable economy, and should be supported through: housing affordable to all income levels; affordable mobility options; economic policy to encourage livable wages and good jobs; and opportunities for all to participate in education, cultural events and arts.”

This is not the model Santa Barbara has followed to date. The gap between the wealthy and poor continues to increase and the middle class continues to become a smaller percentage of the population. Some might argue that catering to wealthy condo owners is exactly what is needed to create a stable economy.

Regardless of one’s point of view about the document’s premises, it begins to read like a wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if fantasy. In the vision portion of the document, twenty years from now we’ve given up our personal cars and have opted for car shares. Such massive societal changes seem less designed and more an outcome of personal and economic options that arise.

There is also a level if indirection in the document that is hard to pierce. The methods outlined for achieving the idealized future state are largely passive. One example is the shift in housing density and values. By pushing any residential development that does occur to focus on affordable housing in the downtown area, improving access to transit, and by making the area more livable, it is assumed that fewer people will need to drive cars, or possibly, over the long term, need to acquire them in the first place.

The obvious means to get people out of their cars is not to slowly move more of the housing stock to a downtown corridor, but to increase the cost of driving. Add a $1 per gallon surcharge to all gas in the city. If congestion remains too high, increase it. To get parked cars off the street, add a $1000 annual registration fee.

But it is not so simple. Not only are such laws illegal, but they are obviously very unpopular. So cities must satisfy themselves with slow, veiled movements with the hope that their movements precipitate intended results.

Randy Rowse feels the proposed updates are a “monumental artist’s concept” of what Santa Barbara should be, but one that bears little resemblance to what the town is now, or will likely become.

The plan is expensive ($2.4 million to conduct the EIR), it is large, and it is abstract. And it is, in many senses, our future.

For all the heat that might arise with the updated plan drafts, however, Weiss believes the process, called Plan Santa Barbara, will remain solid. The majority of the new City Council members have strong backgrounds in the planning process, and all members have seen, and have had the opportunity to comment on, the various components of the update.

“We’ll have hearings at the Planning Commission where the City will hear from the public. Then we take it to the City Council in June.” Weiss hopes that at that time, the Council will “give us guidance and send us away [and] we’ll come back in October with a finished General Plan.”

It’s a tough exercise, but one the City has completed multiple times before. Each time with intended, and unintended, consequences.

Walking the Walk

To better understand what Plan Santa Barbara means, I invited Weiss to take a walk through a portion of town of her choosing where we could see first hand some of the issues the City is attempting to tackle with this General Plan update. Because a critical component of Santa Barbara planning is the transportation component, she invited Rob Dayton, Principal Transportation Planner with the City’s Public Works department to join us.

The route Weiss chose started on Wentworth Avenue on the lower Westside. The plan was to then walk from Wentworth, cross the Union Pacific railroad tracks and the 101, and then walk along Ortega Street and through the controversial Chapala corridor, across State Street and back once again to the City planning offices on Garden Street.

Along the way, we would talk about Plan Santa Barbara as a process and a set of guidelines, and we would look at many of the situations that Santa Barbara’s General Plan update is attempting to address.

I am hoping this walk will connect some of the dots, make some of the concepts come down out of their aeries and take shape.

When we arrive, Weiss stops us before we’ve gone twenty feet. “I want to talk about a premise here, a philosophy, that’s not always understood.” She provides a colorful, one-page, two-sided, hand-out. “The Council set the goals for [Plan Santa Barbara] in 2005. But those goals are a reaffirmation of the goals set twenty years earlier. And before that in the 1970s. And before that in the 1960s. The [current] process is based on that foundation. People have responded with fear. Fear that things will change. But the process is based on that foundation. Not a lot has changed since those plans were put in place.”

Dayton nods his agreement that this is important to get across, “That’s good.”

Numbered 1 through 9, the goals are:

1. Live within our resources by balancing development with available resources and promoting sustainable, pedestrian-scale, transit-oriented development.
2. Ensure affordable housing opportunities for all economic levels in the community, while protecting the character of established neighborhoods.
3. Provide safe and convenient transportation through improved transit, circulation, and parking.
4. Ensure a strong economy that provides the revenue base necessary for essential services and community enhancements.
5. Advance regional thinking, collaboration, and solutions.
6. Maintain the unique character and desirability of Santa Barbara as a place to live, work, and visit.
7. Provide adequate services and facilities.
8. Encourage public involvement, and participation at all levels of city planning and other government activities.
9. Develop explicit environmentally sustainable policies.

But we had to start somewhere, and with the big picture in hand, we dropped immediately into the details.

Small Changes, Big Improvements

“Stand in the middle of the street.” Dayton points to the barren asphalt, midstream on Wentworth. “This street is wider than the average street.” The average Santa Barbara street is 36 feet wide. Wentworth is 42 feet wide.

Before the city went to work on the street in 1995, the street felt at once depopulated and urban. As a result, drivers tended to drive faster on Wentworth. People were more likely to abandon cars and unwanted furniture and televisions there. With the Union Pacific right-of-way on one side, it felt less like a neighborhood and more like a thoroughfare.

The city has a limited tool bag. Of these, some of the most concrete are infrastructure improvements and park development. For Wentworth, the city used both.

One end of the street was anchored with a public park, El Parque de los Ninos. The park wraps around a couple of residences at the corner, one leg of the park providing community gardens, the other a playground. According to Weiss, “Critics of the plan said the park would be too noisy” because it backs up on the tracks and the freeway. “But now that its here, I think you have to say its better to have it than not.” Every time I visit the neighborhood, the park is in use by children and their families. The park is largely garbage and graffiti free.

To reduce the impact of the open width of the street, the city added relatively inexpensive tree planters in the parking lane. These are free-standing, raised, curbed areas that don’t impede drainage or consume limited parking (on a street where parking is more than adequate). As the trees matured, they created a sense of narrowing overhead closure on the street.

The street is one of the city’s success stories. It feels more like a neighborhood now, calmer and quieter. The traffic is slower. People dump less often, and when they do, they tend to at least shove their unwanted goods over the fence into the Union Pacific right-of-way.

That right-of-way is the first of Santa Barbara’s big barriers.

Where Are We

“We’re constantly trying to break down barriers.” Dayton has stopped high on the pedestrian overpass that links Ortega Street from west to east. The overpass is new, replaced after being hit by a passing truck on the 101. The gaunt steel vultures and toucans designed by local artist David Shelton peer down at us, cars slip past, a tidal signature of garbage and graffiti crusts the Union Pacific corridor below. “The 101 corridor is a challenge for cars, pedestrians, and bicyclists. The most congested intersections are along this corridor. The walking experience in those intersections is not good. For cyclists, it’s a narrow point. The freeway becomes the barrier.”

The barriers are as old as Santa Barbara, and are worth thinking about.

Downtown Santa Barbara is essentially an alluvial fan of eroded soil from the Santa Ynez Mountains. The spread of soil is boxed in on the south by the Mesa. Mission Creek, Rattlesnake Creek, and Sycamore Creek drain to the sea along Santa Barbara’s beaches and carry fresh soil. Though we like to think of Santa Barbara as ‘all cooked,’ the terrain has changed fairly dramatically in the last 100 years.

Laguna means lake and for the first several decades of European development in Santa Barbara, a seasonal estero or lake, according to Neal Graffy’s Street Names of Santa Barbara, “extended at its fullest from present day Milpas to Santa Barbara streets and from Anapamu to the beach.” The entire area flooded during heavy rains and dried to a flat hard-pan in the summers. Santa Barbara put a racetrack there and the fairgrounds; ephemeral pursuits for an ephemeral area of town.

Then, through successive floods and some engineering, the area filled in, the streams were channeled and diverted, and housing and commerce stretched out onto the lowlands.

By then, the major transportation lines had already been drawn, and they were all drawn around the lakebed. The first major access to town was from the beach. Arriving passengers and dry goods, livestock, horses, building supplies, and much of the regions’ food was off-loaded from ships into the surf and then eventually Stearn’s Wharf. Hides, otter skins, tallow, asphaltum, and a smaller number of passengers leaving than arriving shipped out.

Coach roads slipped in from the south along the coast, crossed a rise that lay between the beach and the estero or lake, and then turned up State Street. Coaches carried passengers and their luggage, mail, and smaller commercial packages.

Access and commerce were nearly one and the same. One needed the other, like blood and breathing.

When the railroad arrived in the late 1880s, the rails paralleled the old Los Angeles Stage Road, and then, instead of turning up the State Street corridor, it jogged out a few blocks to run between San Pascual and Rancheria streets, and ran north from there. To get across the estero, a raised railbed several feet deep was built like a levee across the lakebed with intervening bridges and culverts to enable the water to run off to the sea. Commerce and access were separating, but just by a few blocks.

The fate of the town was set.

When the State highway came through, or more accurately was organized from disparate existing roads into a contiguous system, it linked Coast Village to State and then Hollister as California’s Pacific Coast Highway 1 for a time. Where the road bed entered town from the south, it was also built like a levee and crossed bridges and culverts for drainage. But when the 101 was built in 1951, it hugged the railroad, consuming Rancheria Street with eminent domain. In 1995, when the stoplights were finally removed from Santa Barbara’s interface with the freeway, transportation was finally transportation. Commerce was effectively separated from local access.

As a result, much of what we inherit is, as Rob Dayton says, “two different Santa Barbaras.” One lies north and east of the Union Pacific/101 corridor, the other to the south and west.

A significant portion of what the City has accomplished in the twenty years since the last General Plan amendments has been focused on breaching the barrier between the two. Successful projects include the Mission Street—101 underpass, the Micheltorena Street bridge replacement, updates to the Carrillo underpass, major improvements along the State and Garden street crossings, and now underway, an overhaul at Milpas.

Much of the work has been done by Caltrans, but the City has worked closely with Caltrans architects and engineers to produce the best possible experience for pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers in Santa Barbara.

We start across the pedestrian bridge and look down.

The Line Between

Neither Weiss nor Dayton stands on sure footing when we talk about the freeway and rail lines that pass beneath us. Like the pedestrian walkway, their primary interests lie in getting over the obstacles, less in the nature of the obstacles themselves.

Weiss recognizes these as major transportation corridors. “They’re going to generate noise and air pollution.” They attract crime, dumping, graffiti. But, she points out, the jurisdictions for these corridors overlap. The governing bodies are Union Pacific, Caltrans, Santa Barbara Police, and the CHP. “The problems [in the corridor] are mostly treated as public safety and enforcement concerns.”

Weiss notes that one way to deal with the noise and pollution is to invest in heavy landscaping. But the heavy landscaping tends to increase the other problems of homeless use, dumping, and other more serious crimes. A lot of landscaping has been removed from the 101 and Union Pacific corridor in Santa Barbara in the last ten years. As a result, crime is down; noise and air pollution along the corridor are up.

One potentially large impact to the city plan update during the Plan Santa Barbara cycle is a request from the County Air Pollution Control District that new development along the downtown freeway corridor occurs only outside a 500-foot buffer zone. For reference, 500 feet is roughly the length of a city block. If the buffer were to be realized, think of a dead zone for new development that stretched from San Pascual to Castillo, Gutierrez to Yanonali.

Smaller buffer zones are being debated.

The buffer is directly counter to stated objectives elsewhere in the plan, specifically of locating workforce housing close to transportation corridors. If the workforce lives close to major transportation lanes, workers travel distances are shorter and their access to alternate transportation much easier to orchestrate.

We descend onto Ortega Street on the east side of the freeway. Here, the city has pulled out their infrastructure toolkit again, targeting the highly-traveled corridors leading to and from the two pedestrian freeway overpasses.

Red-Carpet Treatment

In a development called the West Downtown Project, the two streets feeding in from the two overpasses are receiving what Dayton calls the “pedestrian red-carpet treatment.”

The treatment includes pedestrian light standards, brick intersection crossings, curb extensions with ramps for the handicapped and tactile surfaces for the blind, and plantings. The tactile surfaces are Federally-mandated. “The Feds have changed their minds twice in the last ten years about what the [tactile] surface should be,” Dayton says. Thus different surfaces have been implemented at different intersections throughout downtown, depending on the standards in place when they were put in.

The pedestrian light standards are shorter that street lights, they hang over the sidewalks instead of over the parking lane, and they use a lower wattage.

Dayton particularly likes the corner treatments. When we reach the first corner at Ortega and Castillo, there are cars and bicycles and pedestrians passing through. A resident working in her yard, takes a break to talk with a neighbor. A work crew is installing the new light standards in the next block.

Some people have called the curb extensions ‘bulb-outs’ which are physical obstructions meant to slow traffic. Mistakenly, in Dayton’s view. “The curb extensions are not bulb-outs. They don’t obstruct the traffic lanes.”

“Stand in the middle of the street.” Dayton sends me out into traffic to see the intersection and the flow from the perspective of a bicyclist or driver. Standing in front of an on-coming burgundy Jetta and looking north, I can see the bicycle and traffic lanes are unobstructed.  Weiss points out that “only the dead areas where there’s no parking are used.” The curb extensions shorten the pedestrian crossings from 36 feet to 24. It feels safer as a pedestrian. When you stand in the extension, ready to cross, your intention to traffic is clear.

Dayton turns to two middle-aged Latina women as they pass through the intersection. “How do you like this?” He points to the fresh plantings, the new concrete ramps, the bricked-in crossings.

They smile and nod, “It’s nice.”

“Do you feel safer? Does it make the street look nicer?”

“Yes. We like it.”

But the city’s investment is more strategic than simply enhancing the walking and biking environment. Weiss points out the homes along Ortega, all of them well-kept, many of them original architecture from the teens and twenties, and tasteful where additions have been made. “If you create quality infrastructure, the neighborhood tends to live up to the quality.”

The discussion quickly shifts from infrastructure to what is happening inside the structures on the street.

Luxury Creeps Downtown

The zoning along Ortega, and throughout this section of town, is multi-unit and has been for decades. As a result, there are a lot of what might be called pop-ups and carve-outs. The pop-ups are the more recent two-to-four unit structures built in the back yard of the original home. You generally don’t see them until you’re right out in front of the house and then the higher roofline of the rear units looms between the trees.

The carve-outs are the larger original homes, often Victorians that have been cut into multiple units. These sport a row of mailboxes on the front porch and a variety of curtains in the windows.

Both these types of development leave the character of the street largely untouched. Except, of course, for increased numbers of cars on the streets and more people in the neighborhood. But because the transition from single family homes to multiple units has occurred over many years, the impact of increased density is not experienced as a sudden, negative shift.

In previous general plans, Santa Barbara has focused on the number of permissible units in neighborhoods like this. “That has had some unintended consequences,” Dayton says. We’re in the 400 block where Dayton owns a rental and has some personal experience with the changes that have occurred.

Most of the homes in the block are older, circa 1910 to 1930. All have been split into multiple units running from two units to six. The individual units range from 450 to 1200 square feet. In any classification, these would be considered workforce housing. More recently, a residence went in with three units, averaging 2200 square feet.

The development was permissible based on the number of units, but the size of the units and the new construction significantly increased the value of the units relative to the neighborhood.  The differential can create stresses, both now between the expectations and means of neighbors, and for property owners in the neighborhood as decisions are made in the future about selling or remodeling, and in determining what the neighborhood and market will bear.

More importantly, the structure was seen as a loss to one of the city’s closely held objectives, that of retaining and creating more workforce housing. The new units were not considered workforce. As former mayor Sheila Lodge, writing from her position as chair of the General Plan Update Committee for the Citizen’s Planning Association wrote, “We do not need more luxury condos.”

“How do you avoid these kinds of unintended consequences?” Dayton is moving towards Bath Street. “One way is to limit the size of units.” Limiting unit size is one of the key means that the city is looking at to encourage the retention and development of more affordable, workforce housing. And workforce housing, according to many of the plans developers and critics, is the heart and soul of Plan Santa Barbara.

Workforce Housing

Where Ortega crosses De La Vina, the intersection appears under siege. De La Vina for the moment is narrowed to a single lane due to the city’s curb and brick work underway. On the corner, yellow tape and raw plywood signify ongoing construction on a multi-unit building.

Weiss stops to admire the work on the apartment building at 633 De La Vina. “I don’t know this project, but it looks like a great project. First of all, I see the yellow Notice of Development sign up which means it has come through the city. It’s been reviewed once or possibly twice by the ABR.” The ABR is the city’s Architectural Board of Review which reviews development with an eye to the consistency of the project with aesthetic standards for the downtown area.

“It’s a conversion of a 1950s or 60s boring stucco box to more of a Spanish Colonial,” Dayton says. “It looks like it started with six to eight units and will keep that many. So it retains the density.”

The contact on the Notice of Development sign is architect Christine Pierron. “Santa Barbara Housing Authority owns the property,” Pierron explains when I call her later. “These are the kinds of projects they like to do as they get funding.” Grants were received to upgrade the windows and utilities. The funds were extended to upgrade the appearance of the structure also. The building started with eight units and will retain eight units.

To a large extent, the battle for workforce or affordable housing is at the crux of the General Plan update, and has been a Santa Barbara stumbling block for over sixty years.

In a letter to the Planning Commission from Naomi Kovacs, Executive Director of Citizen’s Planning Association, the fundamental problem is that “given the worldwide competition for real estate in the Santa Barbara area, the expense of owning or renting a place of residence here will remain above the national average for the foreseeable future. As a result, the private sector cannot build our way out of the jobs/housing imbalance. Indeed, all four basic “scenarios” analyzed by the consultants produce considerably more market-rate than affordable units and would thus increase that imbalance and decrease our city’s economic and cultural diversity.”

What Kovacs is pointing to are the two mutually exclusive principles Santa Barbara planners are perennially asked to address: to retain Santa Barbara’s “small town feel” which is a product of the city’s “slow growth path” while reducing “the current jobs/housing imbalance.”

The General Plan supposedly precipitates the resolution of these two principles down through infrastructure improvements, regulated development, and successfully encouraged new behaviors.

Everyone in the battle seems to know, however, that over the long haul, that’s not going to happen.

Santa Barbara’s Old Math

One of the things the planning process brings to the surface in Santa Barbara is the concern about the widening gap in the economic strata, and the flight of the middle class. In other words, the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, and the middle is slowly leaving.

Limiting the size and growth of a place, especially one as beautiful and climatically equable as Santa Barbara, causes the limited stock of housing to increase in value. As housing values increase, the demographic begins to skew: more people who can afford more expensive homes move in. (If they didn’t move in, the housing values would not rise.)

For people on the lower end of the earning spectrum, as housing values increase they find fewer and fewer opportunities to buy. But rental prices also rise. Ultimately, fewer and fewer can afford their own place. In order to work in this beautiful town, the lower earners begin to bunk-up, moving more people into fewer units and less square footage.

The middle class, ever-pragmatic, prefer to own rather than rent. Home ownership brings with it the stability a family requires to weather Santa Barbara’s very expensive housing market. You need to get in, set your housing costs, and then increase your earnings over time so that by the time you retire, you have paid your mortgage down and have some security. In the middle class mentality, a middle class renter is really just a future poor person. Thus the middle class in Santa Barbara, if they have not gotten a mortgage within the first five to ten years of their working life here, tend to leave.

“I agree the trend is real,” Weiss says. “But the City can put a good program in place to maintain the percentages [of affordable housing units]. We don’t have to lose ground.”

At the corner, we step out of the workforce housing debate, and back in time, as we enter another type of pocket in Santa Barbara’s complex matrix.

History Street

We hit Bradbury Street and head south. Bradbury is a one-block long, little-traveled street, with homes on the west side of the street and mostly the rear entries to Chapala businesses on the east.

This is a street with older homes that the city does not treat as an integral historic area because of the mix of structures and uses. A yellow Notice of Development sign flags new development on the street that has been passing through the approval process. “The building will be more modern in appearance,” Weiss has seen the plans. “It will have a flat roof and be very green, but it will still mesh with the character of the street.”

A quick jog to the west and we’re on Brinkerhoff. Doctor Samuel Brinkerhoff owned the large white home at 124 Cota Street and graded the lane below his house for development in 1857. Weiss has an affinity for the street. “There’s a great deal of historic integrity on Brinkerhoff. [But] where you have a lot of integrity of historic structures, you have struggles with use. These [structures] have all switched back-and-forth between residential and small commercial use for a long time. Sometimes it happens without permits.

“We would like to beef up our position on code for historic structures in our Historic Resources Program. We don’t want to compromise the character” of an area like this.

One of the components that Citizen’s Planning Association would like to see established in the General Plan is a Historic Resources Element. According to Weiss, this will start to happen with this update. “We call it a framework. It’s a table of contents, a placeholder. It will be a section in the General Plan called a Historic Resources Element. We’re putting the existing [historic resources] policies and some new policies in there.” At a later date, the element will be addressed as a whole and revamped.

We pass through the alley between Brinkerhoff and Chapala. “This alley is a great buffer zone,” Weiss points out. Services, trash cans, garage doors all face each other across the narrow lane, stitched together by overhead cable and phone lines. The difference between Brinkerhoff and Bradbury is stark in this regard. Homes on Bradbury face the rear entrances and services of businesses; on Brinkerhoff the rear entries of the two distinct land uses – in strictly technical terms – abut.

We turn the corner once, twice, and we emerge onto Chapala Street. This is the site of Santa Barbara’s perhaps most visible and talked about unintended consequences. And we’re right back in the debate about workforce housing. Or more accurately, luxury condominiums.

The Street of Unintended Consequences

Planning is the art of avoiding unintended consequences, and conversely, of achieving intended consequences that age well. But there is no escaping the unintended, and no guarantee that intended consequences will be welcomed once they arrive.  For unintended consequences, Chapala One has no match in Santa Barbara. No one expected the building, completed in July 2008, to have quite so many.

Chapala One is a mixed use, high-density development at 401 Chapala Street in which there is 7,700 square feet of commercial space, 1,200 square feet of office space, and 46 housing units. It was opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on July 9, 2008, but with the exception of an on-site residential manager, has stood empty ever since.

During the permitting of the facility, people close to the development (who asked to remain nameless) said the project had no difficulty making it through the approval process. “No one had to twist any arms.” And that once it was built, “there was a lot of interest from buyers.”

Weiss remembers the approval process differently. The city “always felt it was overparked.” The project provided two parking spaces for each condo unit, while the city required only one, an increase to the completed structure of approximately 9200 square feet. “And we felt the [residential] units were too large.”

The last change made in the plans was a crucial one. The Planning Commission viewed the standard building setback from Mission Creek with unease. The building is squarely in the Mission Creek flood plain and the Commission wanted a larger setback from the stream. They reached an agreement with the developer that in exchange for a larger setback, the developer would be allowed to increase the building height. According to Weiss, Planning Commissioner Bill Mahan commented at the time, ‘I feel like this is a mistake.’

In general, the feeling now is that the building is too massive for the location. Sitting on the southwestern side of the street, the structure’s shadow is cast over the roadway most of the day. The larger, luxury condo units are the exact things no one in a planning role in Santa Barbara seems to want for the city. Weiss still wishes the residential units could be cut down in size and made more affordable. And as the building molders in foreclosure proceedings, the taped up windows on empty storefronts don’t help with downtown vitality, public acceptance, or project justification.

But, according to my source close to the developer, the timing of the development was poor. “If it had been completed two years earlier, it would be all filled up. The timing was just terrible.”

Chapala One was a direct consequence of the city’s stated desire to develop a denser, and yet more livable and vital downtown as expressed in the 1990 General Plan amendments, which in turn were an expression of voter sentiment as stated in 1989’s Measure E. The model most often referred to that supports such development, and one that has cropped up in Plan Santa Barbara in a big way, is the Mobility-Oriented Development Area, or MODA.

We walk the short block to State, the center of Santa Barbara’s proposed MODA.

‘I Think I Live in a MODA’

Mobility-Oriented Development Areas is a hot topic in modern planning. As cities have shifted away from traditional planning models which followed the car from one parking lot to the next, they have looked for models that help create or recreate vital, communal downtowns. Cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Manhattan have adopted MODA models.

MODAs are in many ways nostalgic. They hearken back to a time when cities were smaller, more social, less stretched and compartmentalized by the car. Santa Barbara already exemplifies MODAs to an extent.

Dayton stands at Chapala and Cota Streets in downtown, watching the light change and cars pass like a gaggle of flushed quail. “The downtown street system was laid out before there were cars.” The compactness, the assumption of personal contact in commerce, works better for people, and ironically for cars. “Upper State was designed specifically for the automobile. But it moves a lot less traffic a lot less effectively than the downtown system.”

Plan Santa Barbara introduced the MODA concept to Santa Barbara. But many people have responded negatively. Council member Frank Hotchkiss moved to remove MODA from the planning drafts. The Citizen’s Planning Association, Women’s League of Voters, and the All Neighborhood Association all recommended in writing that it be removed.

MODA on the Plan Santa Barbara draft land use map spread from Milpas to the Funk Zone below the freeway, and from the Funk Zone all the way up State Street to the 154 where city limits give out. The corridor is roughly a six-block strip centered on State Street with bulb-outs (excuse the misapplied term for the apt image) to include Milpas and a six-block square centered at Micheltorena and San Andres.

Weiss agrees that MODA created more heat than most other components of the new general plan. “We’ve removed the MODA boundary from the [draft] Land Use map. We’ll use the principles, not a special district.” During hearings, Weiss recalls, people from the public were saying, ‘I like this MODA concept.’ Or, ‘Hey, I think I live in a MODA.’

The MODA principles envision a community where the need to travel outside the defined corridor is minimized. People live, work, shop, and get their entertainment and exercise close to home. When they do leave, transit nodes embedded in the corridor offer quick, easy, and relatively inexpensive options. As the town becomes more communal and enmeshed, more human and humane, the need for cars simply withers.

Randy Rowse, chair of the Downtown Organization’s Parking Committee, says he would love to see it. But he doesn’t see the rationale behind the vision in Santa Barbara.

“The housing model is about ownership,” Rowse says. At a certain point, he believes, the people the city is imagining moving into the downtown corridor “are going to have kids. And they’re going to want a yard and swings. A neighborhood.” In other words, MODA models which focus on dense settings with higher rental rates might best support a childless workforce, or possibly a larger one, in which a younger segment of the population flows through the MODA outwards towards single family tracts.

The result would not be the finished vision of Plan Santa Barbara, but simply a shift to a higher density downtown with pressure remaining on the community to support a widely spread net of vehicle trips to and from the populous centers.

One potential incarnation of a MODA is an urban mall, a downtown business area closed to vehicular traffic.

Closing State Street

At State Street, cars flow past. We wait for the light.

The notion of closing State Street has “been in the General Plan since 1964,” Weiss says. But there’s more to it than just closing the street.

Dayton picks up the thread. “You can’t just close a street and have it work.” Like round-abouts and Beany Babies, there was a time when everyone was doing it. Some hundred and seventy towns and cities across the United States closed streets and converted them to urban malls in the 1970s. The peak year was 1975. Most of these experiments failed.

“If you walk out on the street,” Dayton explains, “and there’s no one there, you think twice before you come back. There has to be a residential population downtown that supports the [closed] street from early in the morning to late at night.”

Rowse, participating in the Downtown Organization, has seen this proposal surface many times over the years. “If you talk to the merchants on Third Street,” he’s referring to Santa Monica’s Third Street mall, one of the few urban malls that took root and held, “I think a lot of them have regrets. They’re dealing with a homeless population there. They’re looking at a bench sleeping ordinance.”

Traffic Equals Vitality

To Rowse, revitalizing the downtown is not about shaping future development, which in his mind is where Plan Santa Barbara is putting their focus. “Plan Santa Barbara makes most sense in burgeoning times.” During good times, developers are more willing and likely to step up to the built-in disincentives in the city approval process. Development fees, drawn-out approval proceedings – “it can take nine months just to get a sign approved for a new business” – stand in the way of revitalization.

Most immediate in Rowse’s mind is the problem of the perceptions and realities of downtown. “We have a tourist population downtown, but we’re fighting to bring locals back. State Street has a reputation for being unsafe and unclean.”

He believes the reputation is undeserved, but recent parking rate increases and the opening of yet another shopping center – the Costco big-boxes in Goleta – with free parking, in-place security, and co-located stores has siphoned off downtown visitors much as the opening of La Cumbre Mall did in the late 1960s.

“The city deals with traffic through disincentives. They put in calming measures, higher priced parking.” All measures intended to reduce downtown traffic and make transit more attractive. “To me,” Rowse explains, “traffic equals vitality. I would love to see us go back to 90 minute parking.”

Dayton feels the existing parking models that have been in place for decades are functional. “The parking code now is extremely consistent with what’s been done with parking in the past. The first real focus on parking came in 1974, at which point, the code recognized that all parking is not the same. Parking is lavished on customers, restricted for employees, and adequate for residences.”

Around 1981, Dayton explains, most cities doubled their downtown parking requirements for new development. Santa Barbara kept their requirements the same.

“For employees, it adds a little bit of friction. It’s harder to handle cars [for workers in the downtown area]. They use alternate modes. We have a very high use of alternate modes in the downtown area, particularly from a commuter standpoint.”

Rowse agrees that Santa Barbara has a high per capita use of alternate modes of transportation downtown – bicycles, buses, trolleys, trains. “We’re in the top ten percent of cities our size.” But he’s beginning to doubt the friction model for employees. In his mind, once an employee is off work, they become a customer. The distinction between who is parking for what reasons tend to go away in hard economic times like these when Santa Barbara is experiencing a sizable daily inventory of open parking spaces.

“We’re the only shopping district that has paid parking for miles. With Camino Real and La Cumbre Plaza, we’re at a competitive disadvantage. I’d love to see free parking downtown but it will never happen. We’re still amortizing the lots we built.”

“We could really reprioritize the shuttles,” Rowse is talking now about tourists. “Coordinate with the hotels to pick people up regularly and drop them right here on State.” These are the people that don’t need cars in town, not the locals.

Security is another of Rowse’s hot buttons. The Downtown Organization recently helped fund retired police officer Bob Casey’s return to a State Street beat. “State Street is perceived as unsafe. We needed some feet on the ground.” He looks at the new police station with some doubt. “A couple substations on State Street – there are a lot of empty storefronts – would go a long way toward resolving the problems.”

The Public Services and Safety Element of the Plan Santa Barbara drafts addresses water supply, solid waste, recycling and emergency preparedness. Police focus is absent.

The Way to the Future

BWe ended the walk in front of the city offices on Garden Street. Before Weiss goes back inside, she reiterates her belief in the process and guiding principles. She anticipates a hard pull between now and targeted plan approval in October. “Most of what’s in the [draft] plan will remain. There will be changes. Possibly some significant ones. But this council has a lot of experience with the planning process.”

“I appreciate what they’re doing,” Rowse says of City Planning. “They were here before this council and they’ll probably be here long after.” But City Planning has the role of defining regulations based on Council direction. One of the stated objectives that Weiss gave me at the start of our walk is to “ensure a strong economy that provides the revenue base necessary for essential services and community enhancements.”

Rowse said, “Bettie [Weiss] and Rob [Dayton] did talk about economic vitality at one of the [Plan Santa Barbara] workshops. But the next day at the council meeting, there was nothing mentioned.”

The economic incentives in the Policy Preferences draft are limited to unspecified encouragement, promotion, priority, and in a few instances, “start-up license fee rebates.”

“The economy has traditionally been pretty stable in Santa Barbara,” Rowse explains. “But this [economic downturn] is real.” Rowse believes, the economic strength and vitality of Santa Barbara, is where Plan Santa Barbara should be focused. Rowse would like to see fewer disincentives to development and traffic flow, none of which are specified in the draft plan, and more leadership in practical business development. He’s even willing to consider yet a position added to the city’s staff, a business ombudsman to streamline and foster business development in town.

“The city sees developers as a piggy bank they can hit with fees. [Developers] are supposed to see fifteen percent” – Plan Santa Barbara assumes a 15% profit on development projects to calculate returns on investment for residential housing projects – “but we keep transferring the planning costs to the developers in the form of increased fees.” Which raises prices and decreases potential margins. “I don’t think you’ll find an architect who has made money on a Santa Barbara project. Their time gets eaten up in meetings” and the resulting plan changes.

Future Tense

The city will release the draft Environmental Impact Report and the revised supporting documents for Plan Santa Barbara on March 18. They have booked the Faulkner Gallery downtown at the Public Library all day, from 10 a.m.  to 7 p.m., for presentations and open discussions with the public.

In June, City Council will discuss the plan updates and provide direction to the staff.

Between June and October staff will make the needed adjustments and develop a final set of updates to the General Plan.

In October, the plan will likely be voted into law.

Out of this plan will come the city’s objectives and philosophy for every land use and infrastructure decision for the next twenty years. The hope is that, looking back from 2030, the consequences will have been both intended, and welcome.